Quality of will and radical value reversals

Al Mele’s Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (OUP 2019) is an extraordinarily careful and clear little book. A central recurring element is the use of examples of radical value reversals due to manipulation. In this commentary, I discuss the relevance of these examples to a simple quality of will account of blameworthiness without explicit historical conditions. Such an account, I suggest, can fairly straightforwardly explain how value reversals might mitigate blameworthiness. But I also suggest that the intuition that they completely remove blameworthiness should instead be explained away

Hard diffraction -- 20 years later

The idea of diffractive processes with a hard scale involved, to resolve the underlying parton dynamics, was published 1985 and experimentally verified 1988. Today hard diffraction is an active research field with high-quality data and new theoretical models. The trend from Regge-based pomeron models to QCD-based parton level models has given insights on QCD dynamics involving perturbative gluon exchange mechanisms, including the predicted BFKL-dynamics, as well as novel ideas on non-perturbative colour fields and their interactions. Extrapolations to the LHC include the interesting possibility of diffractive Higgs production.Comment: 14 pages, 19 figures. Invited talk at XXII International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at High Energy, Uppsala, Sweden, June 30-July 5, 200

Experimental philosophy and moral responsibility

Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of judges goes up. In this chapter, however, I argue, partly based on empirical evidence, that although non-specialist judgments might on average be more likely than not to get things right, their individual likelihoods fail to aggregate because they do not track truth with sufficient independence

Tracking chains revisited

The structure ${\cal C}_2:=(1^\infty,\le,\le_1,\le_2)$, introduced and first analyzed in Carlson and Wilken 2012 (APAL), is shown to be elementary recursive. Here, $1^\infty$ denotes the proof-theoretic ordinal of the fragment $\Pi^1_1$-$\mathrm{CA}_0$ of second order number theory, or equivalently the set theory $\mathrm{KPl}_0$, which axiomatizes limits of models of Kripke-Platek set theory with infinity. The partial orderings $\le_1$ and $\le_2$ denote the relations of $\Sigma_1$- and $\Sigma_2$-elementary substructure, respectively. In a subsequent article we will show that the structure ${\cal C}_2$ comprises the core of the structure ${\cal R}_2$ of pure elementary patterns of resemblance of order $2$. In Carlson and Wilken 2012 (APAL) the stage has been set by showing that the least ordinal containing a cover of each pure pattern of order $2$ is $1^\infty$. However, it is not obvious from Carlson and Wilken 2012 (APAL) that ${\cal C}_2$ is an elementary recursive structure. This is shown here through a considerable disentanglement in the description of connectivity components of $\le_1$ and $\le_2$. The key to and starting point of our analysis is the apparatus of ordinal arithmetic developed in Wilken 2007 (APAL) and in Section 5 of Carlson and Wilken 2012 (JSL), which was enhanced in Carlson and Wilken 2012 (APAL) specifically for the analysis of ${\cal C}_2$.Comment: The text was edited and aligned with reference [10], Lemma 5.11 was included (moved from [10]), results unchanged. Corrected Def. 5.2 and Section 5.3 on greatest immediate $\le_1$-successors. Updated publication information. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1608.0842

Action and Ethics. A Historical Perspective on the Late Frankfurt School (Apel, Habermas, Wellmer)

I shall delineate what I see as the strength and relevance of transcendental-pragmatics within the intellectual setting in the post-war period. I shall indicate how the discussions within transcendental-pragmatics have revealed inherent challenges, while at the same time the intellectual and institutional surroundings have changed unfavorably during the last few decades. And I shall briefly indicate how these inherent challenges and new constellations could and should be met, to the effect that transcendental-pragmatics could reveal its philosophical importance and practical relevance under changed conditions; the catchword here is gradual (melioristic) reasoning

A simple and elementary proof of Whitney's unique embedding theorem

In this note we give a short and elementary proof of a more general version of Whitney's theorem that 3-connected planar graphs have a unique embedding in the plane. A consequence of the theorem is that cubic plane graphs cannot be embedded in a higher genus with a simple dual. The aim of this paper is to promote a simple and elementary proof, which is especially well suited for lectures presenting Whitney's theorem